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US professor quits after allegedly faking racism stats – media

RT | April 12, 2023

Florida State University criminology professor Eric Stewart has quietly resigned after a month-long absence amid an inquiry into whether he faked data in multiple studies to inflate the prevalence of racism in the US, the Florida Standard reported last week.

A fellow of the American Society of Criminology, Stewart was first publicly accused of falsifying data in 2019 by the co-author of one of his studies, University of Albany criminology professor Justin Pickett, who claimed Stewart had made several misleading changes to the numbers in their 2011 paper ‘Ethnic threat and social control: Examining public support for judicial use of ethnicity in punishment’ immediately before publication.

The published study claimed that public desire for harsher sentences for black and Hispanic offenders increased in proportion with the size of the minority populations in a community. However, the study data showed no such relationship existed, and that the opposite might even be true. Pickett revealed that his colleague had doubled the sample size while leaving out nearly three quarters of the counties polled, mangling the data to the point of incoherence, and said Stewart refused to turn over the raw data so that Pickett could re-run the calculations himself.

That study and four more were subsequently retracted, but when Pickett tried to bring the matter to the university’s attention, he claims he was met with four months of stonewalling. When the school did eventually mount an inquiry, the three-person panel in charge included two people who had co-authored studies with Stewart, violating Florida State’s conflict of interest policy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that inquiry claimed it had not found enough evidence for fraud and advised against continuing the investigation.

Pickett told the Florida Standard that coverups by colleagues are common in the field, explaining “there’s a huge monetary incentive to falsify data and there’s no accountability. If you do this, the probability you’ll get caught is so, so low.”

Stewart, who is black, complained to the university that Pickett – who is white – had “essentially lynched [him] and [his] academic career.”

In 2020, a sixth paper authored by Stewart was retracted – though not before being cited by 186 other papers. Another investigation found enough merit in the fraud claims to pursue them, apparently imperiling Stewart’s $190,000 per year position. Florida State declined to discuss the matter with the Florida Standard, and Stewart’s profile is still live on the university’s website.

April 12, 2023 - Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science |

1 Comment »

  1. No accountability and a double standard are the hallmarks of this case. Professor Stewart was probably told to “quietly” resign and nothing would happen to him. So he slipped away with his creds still active so he can show up at another university and continue to spread fraudulent research that proves racism in America is systemic. The only systemic racism in America is at the top of the 1% income bracket. Billionaires Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg are pathetic racists who promote policies that discriminate against black communities. The former was raised by a father who as a member of the Eugenics Society, was also a rabid Malthusian who advocated mass sterilization and depopulation as a way to cleanse the human race of inferior species. While Bloomberg’s stint as Mayor of New York speaks for itself. As Mayor of NY Bloomberg is credited as a crime fighter who implemented a policy that violated the 4th Amendment against illegal search and seizure with his program called “stop and frisk.” How many times did New Yorkers hear a cop yell, “Hey you black boy, stop right there! Show me what you got in your pockets.” Bloomberg’s policies were more like 19th-century Alabama than 21st-century New York City.

    America is an industrial wasteland today with unemployment and underemployment driving down living standards all across America, and Western Europe. Especially in densely populated urban cities where crime, unemployment, and the lack of investment in sanitation, roads, and infrastructure, perpetuate a worsening crisis condition of life for millions of citizens. The response to the crisis by society has been wildly reactionary. We witnessed Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” at one end of the spectrum to “defund the police” at the other.
    Looking backward we can see that there is a causal relationship related to this same crisis by the decisions made after 1976. Decisions that led to the disinvestment out of America’s capital-intensive, energy-intensive physical economy directly on behalf of Wall Street speculators and into the casino economy.
    Deregulation and privatization of the railroads, airlines, and trucking industries in the 70s paved the way for banking deregulation in the 80s.

    Lyndon LaRouche intervened in the 1980s presidential election to reverse the ever-increasing physical collapse of the real economy that was fully underway. LaRouche proposed using new and advanced physical principles in science that would have the effect of revolutionizing the US’s production processes across the board.
    LaRouche’s strategic defense proposal would have also ended the crazy MAD doctrine by rendering nuclear weapons obsolete, ending the threat of nuclear war. Called the SDI, Reagan implemented it while using LaRouche as a back-channel negotiator to get the Russians onboard in a bilateral agreement to mutually develop it. VP Bush and his neocon bushmen sabotaged the program and a decade later the United States fell flat on its face economically.

    Thirty years on and the economic and financial crisis is much worse and the danger of thermonuclear war is much greater. Lyndon LaRouche passed away in 2019 but his wife Helga carries on his work with forward-looking alternatives to end the war in Ukraine and put the world on a different track with a new international architecture. One that has economic development and security guarantees for all nations through cooperation for the peaceful development of the underdeveloped nations of the world.
    This Saturday, April 15th, the LaRouche’s Schiller Institute will be holding a two-day international conference that everyone is invited to attend online by going to the Schiller Institute website and preregistering.
    Together we change world history and make this a better world for all civilizations.

    Like

    Comment by Thomas Lee Simpson | April 13, 2023 | Reply


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